This is not a return to Diana West’s book. However, Andy McCarthy, a man for whom I have very great respect and whom I like very much, has written a review of it in The New Criterion
that, because of its revisionist presentation of a number of historical
events, is among the most discouraging political documents I have read
in many years. Mr. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and distinguished and
perceptive writer of the sensible Right, has frequently inspired me by
his writing, and when I met him, at a difficult time in my own former
travails, by his conversation also. I confidently turned to his review
of Ms. West’s America Betrayed,
which readers of this column will find it hard to forget after the
robust knockabout the book received here and in her reply to me. The
rigor of the review and its application to the book are matters I will
address in a letter to The New Criterion, which the editor of that publication graciously invited, as I am mentioned, quite unexceptionably, in the review.

What
seriously depresses me are three positions taken in the review. First
is Andy McCarthy’s view that the scandalous, cowardly refusal of the
mainstream elite of American culture and politics to recognize that
America’s Islamist enemies are enemies can be traced to Soviet
infiltration of the U.S. government in World War II. It is a fact that
alarms and disgusts all of us in this debate, including Ms. West and her
more vocal (than I am) critics, but I do not agree about the source of
the problem. Second is Andy’s qualified accommodation, as worthy of
reasonable consideration, of the claims by Ms. West that Lend-Lease was
at least in significant part a mistaken reinforcement of Stalinist
totalitarianism to the ultimate detriment of the West; that the Normandy
invasion served Stalin’s purposes and enhanced his penetration of
Western Europe; that Franklin D. Roosevelt was more or less ambivalent
about the comparative virtues of Stalinist Communism and Western
democracy (though he acknowledges that FDR disapproved of the barbarism
of Stalin’s rule); that the Yalta
agreement “gave” Stalin half of Europe; and that the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations were so significantly influenced in a pro-Soviet
direction by Soviet agents and such arch-sympathizers that the
distinction between an agent and a sympathizer was academic in the
United States. And third, I am distressed by Andy McCarthy’s partial
defense of Joseph R. McCarthy and his conclusion that the smear of
McCarthy enabled Communism and anti-American reflexes to flourish in the
United States through all the intervening years and are responsible for
the inadequate general response to the Islamist threat that, I repeat,
all the participants in this very heated and prolonged exchange revile
in almost equally emphatic strictures....